I'm a Retired Navy Corpsman who works at Naval Hospital Oak Harbor, married to a bright haired girl, take pictures and sleep with dogs and sometimes blog. Enjoying the process of building a skillset where I can fix anything anything animate, inanimate or spiritual.
Disclaimer: The words expressed here in no way represent the views of the Navy, Marines, DOD or even humanity in general. They are mine alone unless otherwise stated.
"When life gives you a swamp, find a yoda"

Saturday, July 09, 2011

Back in 2008, I needed some more processing power to put together my squadron's deployment video and purchased a Toshiba gaming laptop which worked great for what I needed but lately, I've noticed that it struggled with processing HD movies and handling what my new camera put out. The thought of a new laptop was lurking in the back of my mind.

Well a couple of weeks ago, one of my dogs (I believe!), knocked over a beer onto the keyboard and my trusty Toshiba wouldn't turn on. So I field stripped it, taking everything apart and cleaning it with alcohol and put it back together and it worked well, except for the keyboard and had to plug in a USB keyboard. So I back up everything on an external and started thinking about my next portable brain.

Last weekend, we came up to San Jose for the Fourth and went to Fry's Electronics (if you don't have one in your area, it's a geeks Disneyland) and I went to the tech gal and asked, "What's your best deal on an i7 processor laptop this weekend", and she said, "we just got a truckload of these Lenovo laptops that haven't even hit the floor yet" and I said, "Sweet!"

So a grand later (the laptop was 799, got a two year doggie warranty and a CD for the bride), I was the happy owner of the laptop in the title of this post. Here's my Amazon review of the same system.

Great deal for the price, July 7, 2011

PROS-At the time of printing, this might be the lowest price Core I7 laptop on the market, solid metal body which does not feel cheap at all. A huge 750 gig hard drive, keys were felt smooth to use and not too much bloatware. The sound is great and I was a little upset by the loss of a fingerprint reader until I realized that it had built in facial recognition software called Lenovo VeriFace which turns on the camera and it puts a Borg circle thing around your right eye and automatically logs you on (this StarTrek gear impressed me and my coworkers)

No USB 3.0 (at least I haven't found it yet) which should be automatically included with any I7 processor, the mousepad takes some getting used to with the pebbled surface, while I like the keyboard, the number keys and the keyboard are squished together. The metal surface is nice but a fingerprint magnet. No Blueray player and only 4 gigs of RAM. Also, finding stats on the Lenovo website such as max RAM, what exactly is under the hood, those guys need to do some work on their web development, a polished product like this should be backed by good customer support online and PR, instead, you have to fight in circles to dig out gold nuggets of information. Also the included documentation in the box is skimpy.

Overall-A great buy for the price, beautiful and quick laptop with a top of the line processor for half of the price I paid for my last laptop. So far it seems to do my HD video processing well which is why I upgraded. For a big purchase like this, so far I've had little buyer's remorse and would likely make the same purchase again.